Affordable housing for families? Bigger apartments.

Since I was just on a tear about the choices people make to live in transit-unfriendly sprawl, my friend K pointed me to this Don Cayo write-up of a report on rental housing for families in Vancouver. The report comes from Bing Thom Architects, and it says that — as you might guess — Vancouver doesn’t have enough affordable housing for families. No, I don’t suppose it does.

But check out what Michael Heeney, a partner at Bing Thom, says the solution is: “What we do need are rental units with two or more bedrooms that can be occupied by young families.” He’s not taking about building more single-family, detached houses. (Where would we build them?) He’s talking about building condos with two and three bedrooms, instead of just one. He’s talk about building laneway housing that takes up a bigger footprint of a 50-foot lot than the 750 sq. feet that’s currently allowed.

In other words, he’s acknowledging that a lot of families in metro Vancouver don’t necessarily want to own a three-bedroom-plus-den-and-two-car-garage house. They want to live in a dense, walkable, livable part of the city, and they’d be willing to trade a lot of space to do it — if only the city made sure those two and three bedroom condos were there for them to rent.

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3 Responses to “Affordable housing for families? Bigger apartments.”

The potential benefits of rental housing development for Vancouver in terms of consumer choice, housing availability, better quality of life, vibrant neighbourhoods &tc are recognized by the entire floating opera of planners, politicians, architects, developers and everyone with an interest in urban issues. It is alleged that federal tax policy in the 1970s encouraged the construction of Multiple Unit Residential Buildings, whose builders and owners were therefore known as MURBers, and during that period there was plenty of rental housing development in Canadian cities. We are currently waiting for those golden days of tax incentives to return, and until then (folks say) the profits from MURBing are too slender to bother with. So goes the conventional wisdom.

Ian — Thanks for the background. In general, I think zoning that won’t allow for smaller units a real culprit in Vancouver’s lack of affordable rental housing. (The apartments I lived in happily as a grad student in Philadelphia would be too small to get built almost anywhere in Vancouver, I think. Heck, they’d be too small to get built in Philadelphia now — they were built before WWII.)

But of course, smaller units can’t be the answer for 2-3 bedroom apartments. So that leaves tax incentives, I guess.

After the events of the past year I am reluctant to offer investment advice. However, on the relative profitability of rental development vs. development for sale I would venture the following:

– The appreciation of home sale prices has notoriously outrun increases in rents over the past decade.
– Rental properties would normally depreciate more quickly than owned properties so developers may be required to take a lower initial sale price.
– Even if rental properties are somewhat or slightly profitable, private investors (including labour-sponsored pension funds et al) are in the business of maximizing return on investment, not taking second-best.